Universal basic income news: Good or bad, depending on the goal

“Bad News for Universal Basic Income.” The “bad news,” per Reason’s Eric Boehm. is that a nonprofit’s three-year, 1,000-person, $1,000-per-month trial of the idea “resulted in decreased productivity and earnings, and more leisure time.”

Is that really bad news? Well, it depends on who you are and what you want. UBI advocates like Andrew Yang predict the idea would, in part, “enable all Americans to pay their bills, educate themselves, start businesses … relocate for work.”

Bad news indeed … on those metrics, anyway.

But Yang also predicts a UBI would let recipients “be more creative, stay healthy … spend time with their children, take care of loved ones …”

Call it a tie at most.

The education/productivity/work side of Yang’s equation seems like so much window dressing to soothe real economic concerns.

The real marketing sizzle lies in a utopian vision aimed at people who would — quite understandably — rather spend eight hours a day in front of the television set than on the service side of a fast-food drive-thru window and be willing to take a bit of a pay cut (probably offset by reduced costs of transportation, etc.) for it.

I’m opposed to “guaranteed income” schemes for a number of reasons, but those reasons don’t really include the economic side.

I suspect we may be on our way toward the possibility of something like Aaron Bastani’s “Fully Automated Luxury Communism” — an economy in which AI-powered robots become quite capable of handling most, if not all, aspects of economic production, leaving us (at least in theory) with no more strenuous work to do than picking drone-delivered pizza up from the porch and remembering to put the boxes out for robot sanitation workers to whisk away.

In that scenario, a universal basic income would simply serve as a rationing mechanism. Scarcity would still exist. Letting everyone order a new Ferrari each week (after crashing the old one for fun) could bring the system down pretty quickly. You’d have to decide between three pizzas or one ribeye dinner, etc., so as not to strain our robot servants’ productive capacity.

I’m not an economist, and I apologize for playing one on the internet, but I hope you see my point: Inspiring economic activity may not be a necessary feature of a UBI.

The trial results are great news for Fully Automated Luxury Communism types … and for authoritarians who prefer fewer limits to their power over other people.

A UBI wouldn’t really be “universal.” Some groups (prison inmates, for example) would find themselves excluded from the start, with political dissidents, sooner or later, following them into the “no money for you” abyss. The latter would be too busy working (if there were any jobs to be had) or starving to inconvenience our “benevolent” rulers.

That threat would leave them with an entirely free hand (holding a robot-manufactured whip).

Would I love to receive a “subsistence wage,” gratis, no questions asked? Who wouldn’t? But the devils in the details sound more like hell than like utopia.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism ( thegarrisoncenter.org ). He lives and works in north-central Florida.

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